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| Tomer Benyehudam poses for a photo holding an Israel flag near Mar-a-Lago. (Eva Marie Uzcategui/Getty Images) |
| President-elect Donald Trump’s shock electoral gains among Arab-American and Muslim-American voters in Michigan came on the back of widespread frustration with the Democrats. Some saw President Joe Biden’s support of Israel’s devastating campaign in Gaza — and Vice President Kamala Harris’s defense of the administration’s approach — as complicity in “genocide.” Out of rage, once-reliably blue voters opted not to vote at all, turned to third-party candidates or even cast their ballot for Trump. In Dearborn, the Michigan city where around half the population is of Arab descent, Trump won at least 2,500 votes more than Harris. It didn’t help the vice president that she campaigned with former Republican congresswoman Liz Cheney, whose family is broadly associated with engineering the calamitous invasion of Iraq that destabilized the Middle East for a generation. And Trump opportunistically tweaked his campaign pitch in the Detroit suburbs, styling himself as a Middle East peacemaker.
Bishara Bahbah, a Palestinian American and founder of Arab Americans for Trump, insisted that the newfound Arab American support for Trump was not just a protest vote, but anchored in a belief that a second Trump term would mark a departure from his first — when Trump demonized Syrian refugees, tried to block citizens of certain Muslim-majority countries from entering the United States and aligned U.S. Middle East policy more closely to the interests of Jewish supremacists on the Israeli far-right. “I believe he is a different person than he was in 2016 and 2020,” Bahbah told Israel’s Channel 12. “He now wants an end to the war and a lasting peace in the Middle East. And that is what resonates with the Arab and Muslim American communities.” Bahbah added that he also believed Trump would be committed to the cause of a two-state solution.
In the days since Trump’s victory, all signs point to Bahbah being wrong. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his far-right allies cheered Trump’s imminent return to the White House, confident that their interests will be better furthered by a Republican administration. That includes the outright annexation of areas of the West Bank sought by prominent members of Netanyahu’s cabinet. And Trump has tapped a string of officials for top Middle East-focused roles for whom Palestinian concerns will never be a priority. The Biden administration appears to have decided it won’t restrict any arms transfers to Israel, despite imposing a deadline that elapsed this week urging Israel to improve the flow of aid into the war-ravaged Gaza Strip. U.N. officials and aid groups insist that Israel has largely failed to comply with the Biden administration’s demands. Whatever the case, reports in Israeli media suggest Trump has already assured his Israeli counterparts that any restrictions or delays on armaments would be canceled. In his first term, Trump thrilled the Israeli right by recognizing the Jewish state’s sovereignty over the contested Golan Heights, moving the U.S. Embassy to Jerusalem (an act of recognition that was supposed to follow, not precede, the advent of a Palestinian state) and putting forward a vision of the Middle East that didn’t even pay lip service to the idea of the two-state solution. The prospect of Trump’s return next year led Israeli finance minister Bezalel Smotrich, a far-right champion of the country’s settler movement, to delight in what’s to come. “God willing, the year 2025 will be the year of sovereignty in Judea and Samaria,” Smotrich said, referring to the biblical names of the West Bank, where millions of Palestinians live under de facto occupation, shorn of the same rights and liberties afforded to the growing ranks of Israeli settlers in their midst. The rhetoric is reminiscent of former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee’s, who Trump selected as his choice for the next U.S. ambassador to Israel. Huckabee, a committed Christian evangelical, walks in ideological lockstep with Trump’s previous ambassador, David Friedman, who has a close association with Israel’s settler movement. On a trip to Israel during the first Trump term, Huckabee rejected criticism of settlements, which are viewed as illegal under international law and were recently subject to a U.N. General Assembly resolution that demanded their dismantlement and the end of the occupation of Palestinian territories. “There are certain words I refuse to use,” Huckabee told reporters in 2017. “There is no such thing as a West Bank. It’s Judea and Samaria. There’s no such thing as a settlement. They are communities, they’re neighborhoods, cities. There is no occupation.” In his first interview with Israeli media since the announcement of his nomination, Huckabee indicated that the incoming administration would back Israeli annexation moves. “There has never been an American president that has been more helpful in securing an understanding of the sovereignty of Israel,” he said. Progressive supporters of Israel in the United States were alarmed by the implications of Huckabee taking the job. “The mask is off. This announcement is further proof that ‘pro-Israel’ for Trump is totally disconnected from any concern for Jewish values, safety or self-determination,” Jeremy Ben-Ami, president of J Street, a left-leaning pro-Israel group, said in a statement. “It’s all about what ‘pro-Israel’ means to extremists in the MAGA base.” Huckabee is not alone in his bear hug of the Israeli far right. Pete Hegseth, Trump’s pick for defense secretary, has in the past called for a Jewish temple at the site of al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem, touts tattoos that carry slogans associated with the Crusaders who rampaged through the Holy Land, and, while in his role as a Fox News broadcaster, mocked the “pro-Palestinian millennials” inside the Biden administration while cheering Israel’s campaign to “stack bodies” in Gaza. Elise Stefanik, Trump’s choice for U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, is a vocal backer of Israel and earned national fame in her congressional grilling of U.S. university presidents for tolerating anti-Israel protests on their campuses. She’ll take that zeal to the United Nations, and perhaps threaten continued U.S. funding for certain agencies or programs that have the temerity to be critical of the Jewish state. That may include the U.N. special committee that issued a report Thursday alleging that Israel’s conduct of its war in Gaza was “consistent with the characteristics of genocide.” In an act that underscored the new political moment, Netanyahu tapped Yechiel Leiter to be Israel’s next ambassador to the United States. Leiter is American-born and a close associate of Netanyahu; in his youth, he was active in the Jewish Defense League — an organization once listed in the United States as a terrorist group — and linked to the extremist Rabbi Meir Kahane. Leiter lives in a West Bank settlement and is a long-standing critic of the Oslo peace process that envisioned the creation of a Palestinian state. Last year, Leiter lost his son, who was killed in battle with militant group Hamas in Gaza. At his son’s funeral, Leiter warned Biden against pressuring Israel into a cease-fire. “Take it from one plain-speaking Scrantonian to another — we’re going to win this one, with you or without you,” Leiter said, referring to the Pennsylvania town where both he and Biden were born. The irony is that the one-term U.S. president remained a steadfast ally of Israel, arming the Jewish state through its longest war and shielding it from international censure. Now, Trump and the Israeli right stand poised to reap the dividends of the peace that may follow. | ||||||||